India: Ooty and the Toy Train

During a flight from Bangkok last January, I imagined myself flying over the Nilgiri Hills, a mountain range in south India famous for its 19th Century hill station, Ooti, where colonials escaped the summer heat of Madras to temperate valleys that looked like old England. Sir Richard Francis Burton visited Ooti as a young man in the 1840's, and wrote an early book about the cool valley in the Blue Moutains. I had always wanted to take the toy train up from the plains and spend a few days acting like a proper British sahib. David Lean visited the hills in 1984 to film parts of his classic movie "Passage to India," using the Ooti toy train as a stand-in for the local train up to the mysterious Marabar Caves taken by Adela, Mrs. Moore and Aziz. When I got to my hotel in Bombay I asked the concierge to help me plan the trip down to Tamil Nadu. Three days later I flew to Cochin on the Kerala Coast, took a train to Coimbatore, and then a taxi to Mettupalayam at the base of the Blue Mountains. The little meter-gauge train left at sunrise, winding through tunnels and over bridges to Ooti, at 7,300 feet. The Nilgiri Mountain Line is one of three hill station railways recognized by UNESCO in 2005. The other two are located in Darjeeling and Shimla, which I rode on previous trips to India. The 30-mile journey takes five hours, with four stops for water. En route I passed through the Coonoor station, which was used as the Chandrapore Train Station in the Lean film. When I arrived at Ooty, I checked in at Fernhill, the 160-year-old summer palace of the Maharaja of Mysore, the only guest during the off-season in an empty hotel.